The International Day of Women in Diplomacy: Moving Away from Essentialist Universalisms

Source: UN

By Kirthi Jayakumar

June 24 marks the International Day of Women in Diplomacy. The United Nations calls for "Inclusive diplomacy," saying that "Women and girls represent half of the world's population, and therefore also half of its potential. Women bring immense benefits to diplomacy. Their leadership styles, expertise, and priorities broaden the scope of issues under consideration and the quality of outcomes." It also cites research that suggests that "when women serve in cabinets and parliaments, they pass laws and policies that are better for ordinary people, the environment, and social cohesion."

Just looking up from this hagiographic account of what women bring into diplomacy and political leadership will present a reality in stark contrast: Most recently, Giorgia Meloni’s presidency diluted the G7 Communique by dispensing with language addressing abortions. Suella Braverman had some of the most disturbing views and policies on migration. Germany’s Annalena Baerbock crafted its first feminist foreign policy – which is at odds with its commitment to militarism and racist international politics.

Bringing women into gate-kept spaces that have long been the mainstay of patriarchy is arguably one step in the process of interrogating the power dynamics inherent in them. However, it is not a destination.

To add women and stir is not to be feminist: Especially given the implications of such an approach. The reality is that “the level of influence that women can assert on the process that makes a difference, not only their presence by numbers.”

The construction of “women” as a homogenous block is colonial feminism at work, which suggests that “advancements for women can be achieved only if local culture is abandoned.” It makes no room for intersectionality or multidimensionality. It closes out spaces for women who don’t align with the mainstream idea of who is woman enough (elite, white, upper class, upper caste, able-bodied, capable of speaking the colonizer’s tongue in a matching accent). This forces them to mobilize and organize outside the system that will react to them by shutting them down, or offering abject apathy, or coopting their work into a neatly composed compilation of herstories for children, or offering a trophy and a cash prize.  

To reduce peace and “benefits to diplomacy” to a function of one’s gender is to create essentialisms and impose the burden of conformity on the group in question. It also presupposes that women’s voices can be brought into these spaces to address “women’s issues,” and limited, binarized understandings of the gendered impacts of a range of things – not, for example, their views on defence and economic policies, or spacefaring and nuclear weapons, or agriculture and clean energy. This suggests that as a category of people with these experiences, they have all the solutions to rectify these impacts – instead of caring to go deeper to understand why a gendered experience exists in the first place, and who its continued existence is serving most.   

To claim that bringing women into positions of political leadership would mean that they pass laws and policies that are “better for ordinary people, the environment, and social cohesion” feels like a very glossy version of “Boys will be Boys.” The assumption flies in the face of what intersectionality and multidimensionality teach us. Women are, have been, and can easily be patriarchal. Plenty of examples show us how women can and do embrace the same standards of heteronormativity, capitalism, colonialism, extractivism, and misogyny. Women have opted for military solutions, and even upheld patriarchal institutions in their political careers. This is very much the outcome of patriarchal systems – for women have been known to participate in the patriarchal bargain every so often. The production of policies and laws that are better for “ordinary people” are more a feminist endeavour, not the function of one’s gender identity.

This International Day for Women in Diplomacy, let’s do better. Let’s look at gender and feminism for what they truly are meant to in these spaces: A political category that determines how power is enacted, and an active, breathing approach toward dismantling these deeply entrenched systems that normalize exclusion and violence, respectively. Let’s commit ourselves to not replicate systems and structures we are working hard to dismantle, and instead, strive to be authentically feminist.